Web Development

From a simple four-product shopping cart system integrated with PayPal, to hundreds of book titles presented in an Amazon.com style eCommerce system, Foothill Media has the experience and expertise to handle almost any web project. We've built job boards, event registrations, workshop proposals and review systems, intranets, portals, and blogs, to name just a few.

With this level of experience comes a high level of efficiency. By reusing components from past projects and leveraging our experience in a vast array of projects, we can build complete applications in far less time than you might imagine. This means we produce a lot more for a lot less.

We develop for both Windows and UNIX platforms, working with ASP, .NET, and PHP. We are also well-versed in databases, utilizing SQL Server and MySQL. We build every database in anticipation of handling hundreds of thousands records, so that applications are just as fast sorting 100,000 records as it is sorting 100. We always write extra code when it will save the database just a little work.

If none of this makes any sense, that's okay. Think in terms of how you can extend your website to better interact with your clients. Imagine how you can boost sales through an online product catalog. Ease your client services staff through a customer support system. If you can imagine it, Foothill Media will build it.

Please visit our web design page for samples of our website work.

Case Study

RateALeader.com

RateALeader.com is a site that enables people to rate leaders within the political, sports, and corporate fields. The site is backed by a database with nearly 14,000 leaders, but auto-generates static HTML and XML pages for optimal search engine characteristics. There is also a presidential election poll that asks what party a person intends to vote as and their pick of a candidate. On a monthly basis, the site rebuilds itself, creating nearly 30,000 pages on the fly. As each leader is rated, the leader's page is rebuilt/rewritten and a new XML file is written. Each XML file update triggers a ping to notification services to signal an update has been made.

The site was originally developed by another developer and we were tasked with site design. Several months into the project, it became obvious that the developer was not following the original spec and we were asked to take over to ensure that the site stayed on track from both a functionality and time standpoint. We used what code we could, but ultimately 95% of the site was completely rewritten. Running on PHP and utilizing MySQL for the database, RateALeader.com was not technically difficult, but was quite involved. We utilized AJAX to provide real-time database views and as each month represents a fresh look at the data, we display the current month's data, past months, and all-time. We also created a full administrative backend so that the site's owner could manage the editor's blog, press releases and news, book list, and member administration.

The decision to generate static pages as opposed to dynamically displaying data from the database was one taken on faith by the client that we knew what we were doing. Because there was significant time spent on creating the static page generator, we even doubted our methods as the project went on. However, the strategy paid off as within the first month, the site was already getting traffic from search engines and it was ranked eight and nine on Google for "leadership rating".

The next versions of the site are already being discussed and will present a greater technological challenge as we attempt a more graphical representation of data. The site's concept is unique and the final product is one that we are very proud of here at Foothill Media.